Francesca Stavrakopoulou

I’m Professor of Hebrew Bible and Ancient Religion here at the University of Exeter. 

I studied Theology at the University of Oxford, where I also completed my doctorate. I spent a further three years teaching and researching in Oxford as a Junior Research Fellow, before joining Exeter’s Theology and Religion team in 2005. I was appointed to a personal chair in 2011. Alongside my research and teaching, I also undertake various media activities, including writing and presenting the BBC TV documentary series Bible’s Buried Secrets, which was recently re-aired on Netflix US. 

My research is primarily focused on ancient Israelite and Judahite religions, and portrayals of the religious past in the Hebrew Bible. More specifically, I’m interested in biblical traditions and ancient religious practices most at odds with Western cultural preferences, especially those bound up with the materiality and sociality of the body – whether living or dead, divine or human. Much of my research has been supported by grants awarded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the British Academy, and the Leverhulme Trust. 

My most recent book deals with ancient constructs of God’s body: God: An Anatomy (Picador/Knopf 2021) won the PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize, was shortlisted for the Wolfson History Prize, named a best book of the year in both the Economist and Sunday Times, and serialised in abridged form on BBC Radio 4’s Book of the Week. 

My first book explored the misrepresentation of the religious past in the Hebrew Bible: King Manasseh and Child Sacrifice: Biblical Distortions of Historical Realities (de Gruyter, 2004). In my second book, Land of Our Fathers: The Roles of Ancestor Veneration in Biblical Land Claims (T&T Clark, 2010), I furthered my somewhat morbid interests by examining the relationship between the veneration of the dead and territorial claims in the Hebrew Bible. The dead have proved to be stimulating company: I’ve since published a number of works examining the social and religious impacts of the human corpse upon the living, and I’m currently working on a monograph called The Social Life of the Corpse – Within and Without the Bible (forthcoming). 

I’ve edited a number of books: Life and Death: Social Perspectives on Biblical Bodies (T&T Clark, 2021); Religious Diversity in Ancient Israel and Judah (with John Barton; T&T Clark, 2010); Ecological Hermeneutics (with Exeter colleagues David Horrell, Cherryl Hunt and Chris Southgate; T&T Clark, 2010). I’m General Editor of Bloomsbury’s new Hebrew Bible in Social Perspective series, and I work closely with Oxford University Press as co-editor of a series of monographs focusing on biblical characters, called Biblical Refigurations.

Alongside my specialisms in ancient Israelite and Judahite religions, my research interests include material religion; ancient constructs of the body and personhood; anthropological and archaeological approaches to ancient religion; the materiality and sociality of death and dying; ancient visual cultures and the Hebrew Bible; mythology and ritual; kingship in ancient southwest Asia; history and ideology in the Hebrew Bible; methods of historical reconstruction; constructs of ‘popular’ and ‘official’ religion; and ‘secular’ approaches to teaching and learning in biblical studies. I supervise a number of doctoral students working on a wide range of topics pertaining to the Hebrew Bible/early Judaisms and the socio-religious cultures of ancient southwest Asia. 

I teach a range of undergraduate and postgraduate modules focusing on the Hebrew Bible and its texts and language; ancient southwest Asian religions; the early cultural history of God; social and cultural constructs of death and dying; the relationship between religion and material culture; the role and place of the Bible in the modern world; and religious constructs of the body in ancient and contemporary societies.